We are forever barred from recalling the buzzing cacophony that greeted
our entry into this world. Our remembering brains had not formed, they
had not begun to construct a world for themselves outside the womb. And
yet, they had a very ancient kind of knowledge formed over millions of
years. They knew to look for a face, they knew to direct muscles of the
mouth to draw milk from a mother's breast. From a very rudimentary beginning
repertoire they began fashioning a network of sensing and acting to finally
generate the extraordinary machines that can read a page like this one.

In both the womb and with the growing baby, the story is a record of sensuality,
of kinesthetic, visual, auditory, tasting and smelling histories that form
themselves into a predictable order. A sense of past and of anticipation
of the predictable future form a base non verbal imaged story line on which
the layers of human language begin to build themselves. A smooth continuity
informs the transformation of communication from gestures and simple sounds
to strings of words with subjects, objects and verbs that form into stories
about why, what, how, where. This transformation does not occur in feral
children raised by surrogate animal parents, they appear to remain locked
in the more present centered mental space of animals - a space that gives
no flicker of reflectivity. The requirement is for not only our distinctively
human genes but also a cultural context of human communication through
gesture and language kept alive, altered, and transmitted by successive
generations. We are tools of our our tools.

The programming of our brain regions central to social interactions is
just as biological as the workings of a liver or kidney. It involves involuntary
linkages of our primitive mammalian or limbic brain and its neuroendocrinology
to status, sex, affiliation, power - mechanisms whose fundamental aspects
we share with prairie voles and cichlid fish. Unique to humans is the self
conscious confabulator or self-constructor that provides a new level of
nudging, specification, control over these processes. It is this confabulator
that generates what we take to be the world, what we take to be social
sources of validation. All are in fact internal self creations that are
assayed by their utility.

CULTURE

Why must we strive so hard define what is special about us humans compared
with other animals, to deny a continuity between humans and nature, to
want to believe that humans minds are in a category distinct from animal
minds rather than rising from them? Our primate relatives show behaviors
once thought to be distinctively human: cultural transmission of learned
tool use, social politics, and social morality. (Initial crucial studies
proving these points were done in Asian cultural contexts where the separateness
of humans and nature is less emphasized than in the West). The roots of
our shared animal behaviors extend well beyond the primates. The basic
neuroendocrine circuits that regulate our afflictive attachments, as well
as aversions, rewards and addictions are found in the most simple of our
mammalian precursors. What further grows out of human minds is the bringing
of these basic energies under the guidance of personal and cultural stories
that regulate how they are expressed. The primeval triggers of our emotional
behaviors may remain in place, subject to sudden arousal, but they are
now constrained by cultural rules of appropriate context. Thus our daily
experience of being a feeling narrative self is generated by a complex
mix of ancient and modern brain processes. Recently evolved cortical structures
enable us to use linguistic and logical tools to probe the mute emotions
and motivations centered on older parts of our mammalian brain - processes
that constitute most of the mental life of our animal predecessors. These
mute forces, normally inaccessible to our introspection, can play a more
decisive role in our behavior than we usually realize.

HABIT

For our feelings or actions there is not always a reason, in the way we
commonly suppose. Lower parts of our brains can follow rhythms of their
own sending chemical instructions to our thinking brain that can decisively
regulate our temperament, mood, attention, sexual energy, or state of arousal.
These limbic energies however can be stoked by the narrative scripts generated
by our verbal neocortex, whether of love, heroism, despair, or the mundane.
We imagine that the behaviors of our mammalian predecessors are generated
mainly by these mute limbic autopilots, which in us can come under the
additional governance of our self story, so that we are not completely
prisoners of the murky starlings of unknowable old memories. We continuously
grow and renew a self, a story of our place in our culture and world, which
derives from the living presence of the past resident in our memory, as
well as our anticipation of a future. This provides a buffer against our
being high-jacked by the present centered tyranny of the emotional brain
that we share with our primate cousins. For these animals, life centers
on the cusp of the present, while ours has vastly greater abilities to
reflect back and forward. Past and future become tyrants in their own right,
however, if they suppress openness to the present, to novelty and emotional
spontaneity. Our ability to reflect on these processes appears to be unique
in the animal kingdom. Even the great apes, our closest relatives, appear
to be locked into the present, looking out from rather than seeing into
each passing moment.

Our emotional minds draw on our deep history to carry on a life of their
own, Pascal's "The heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing." Much
of this life can be immune to our introspection, as if our thinking and
emotional minds were separate passengers in the same vehicle, occasionally
but not always conversing. In fact, the parts of our brains most central
to our implicit emotional memories and our explicit verbal processing
can be distinguished from each other. The richness of the former can
infuse
the relative aridity of the latter. In its parallel track, our emotional
mind can sometimes remain immune to bogus explanations or rationalization
that our linguistic mind confabulates, leading to the familiar experience
of what we say being different from what we really feel. Thus feeling
provides a useful check or corrective. The cognitive linguistic mind
shows its unique
utility when the normal ripples of our emotional mind suddenly turn into
crashing waves, and it chooses to watch rather than be this upheaval.

If you pay careful attention to your physical body and your breathing as
you enter a familiar place after an absence, or recall a person once important
to you, you can sometimes feel subtle flickerings of your muscles as they
assume a more relaxed or more tense configuration. These are the stored
somatic markers of the emotions you once linked to this place or person
and now bring to life again in more gentle form. Think of these memories
as being almost like alien creatures that you host, whose tentacles reach
through brain and body to generate what you are feeling. Such subtle patterns
are a part of our experience of almost every perception, imbuing them with
them with a negative or positive tinge, for our emotional economy is largely
manichean, diving the world into things to be approached and those to be
avoided. Usually beneath our awareness this continuous labelling goes on,
and we note it best by paying attention not to what we are thinking but
by attending to the changes in our breathing and muscle tonus that can
attend each new perception.

MOTIVATION

There are nerve circuits in our brains, and also in the brains of monkeys,
that not only regulate a movement such as reaching out but also are active
when we see others doing the same movement. They represent a primitive
beginning of empathy, a knowing the experience of another that goes without
words or description. With elaboration, these circuits could be the background
of social ritual, the nonreflective "It is done." Such a basis
for action is central experience for those in interdependent cultures
that value group integrity over individual achievement. Throughout human
history,
there have always been individuals who probed their own motivations and
strived for individual distinction, but the emergence of whole societies
that value individual reflectivity and initiative has occurred only over
past several hundred years.

ACTION

Pause for a moment to think how it is that
you happen to be reading this? Pause, and pull back a moment before
answering... image yourself as a vast and layered library, a partially
self aware archive of all you have ever been. It is from such a depth
that any impulse to act rises. A brief halo of consciousness surrounds
you now, as you have been brought to this moment by muscle movements
directing your eyes to these words. Such an movement is antecedent to
every thought, and the ultimate point of every thought is to plan some
next action. How completely backwards we get it in our ordinary experience,
imagining ourselves to be passive observers of an external world whose
stimuli are processed and analyzed to generate 'output,' as if we were
computers patiently waiting for input instructions to act. Unlike computers,
our brains bring a whole world to every moment, a reality already formed
and constantly under revision, a massive background which dwarfs the
information coming in from the world and going out to act on it. No
action is naive, but rather is patterned by our extensive memory of its
precursors.

AWARENESS

In moments of quiet, looking out at our world, we sometimes can note flickers
of emotional energy that bias us to approach or avoid. These derive from
our archive of stored memories of similar settings or faces, and can very
rapidly and surreptitiously alter our subsequent thinking and reacting.
The process can sometimes be noted if we let the window of our self awareness
gently expand to probe times ever closer to the moment of our initial perception,
without interpretation, and also inhibit our normal impulse to react. It
is as if the clutch normally linking our perceptions to our actions has
been disengaged. For just a moment a habitual response is suspended and
surrounded by mindful awareness. A cloud of background narrative, along
with considerations of personal advantage/disadvantage, is set aside as
we probe closer to an animal-like primal awareness with less cognitive
overlay. A piece of that overlay might be seen more clearly as a bias or
assumption becomes visible in its own right. Such a bias, if we choose
to let it continue, now must operate downstream from the moment of perception.
We have begun to sense the millisecond epochs of our undermind. In these
epochs there is no precise `moment of awareness.' There are rather successive
iterations of more or less awareness at shorter of longer latencies from
triggering events in the environment, depending on current circumstances
and salience. Think of your awareness as an ensemble of larger or smaller
waves washing up on a shore.

Might it be possible it reverse our social ontogeny, to deconstruct through
these meditative techniques those links between social connections and
our thinking/acting selves that have become debilitating, to release
us from a tyranny of our own past to emerge as something closer to the
state
of a feral human or an animal, vitalized by life forces more ancient
than humans and their self conscious language? Only to a limited degree,
for
the very wiring and development of our social brains and their linkages
to our immune and endocrine systems requires from birth our social dialogue
with caretaker - faces, touches, sounds, smells. In their absence we
die, and they remain a mute set of rules about the social world only
later overlaid
by the appearance of an "I" with its self conscious language.
Any techniques of meditation or mindfulness claimed to reveal an "authentic
self" may bring clarity and quiet to confusion, yet still face this
irreducable barrier. While these techniques can enhance clarity and sometimes
permit the choice of new action scripts, our animal minds were not designed
to sit on the cusp of reinventing themselves every moment. Their normal
mode is to subsist on default rituals until the necessity for change
is impelling. The clarity and flexibility of response made possible by
mindfulness
techniques is a metacognitive artifice that requires discipline and practice.
Very few individuals manage to let mindfulness be a platform for their
daily lives.

AGENCY

Our experience of an "I" that initiates action is an illusion,
for brain cells fire to initiate that action several hundred milliseconds
before we are aware of our intention - we are late to consciousness. Late
does not mean irrelevant, however, even though our subjective experience
may bear no more relationship to what the brain is doing than a computer
monitor bears to what the insides of the computer are actually doing. In
this late moment of consciousness, the usefulness or accuracy of our action
can be noted, and an inappropriate action already in process can be inhibited
- as if our capacity is to have "free won't" rather than "free
will." This information can be presented back to the underground
processing that is preparing the next instant of action that we
will retroactively
`intend.' Our brain thus works in an expanded present that contains
the moments antecedent to our awareness of thoughts and actions
and that also persists as their consequences are integrated into
the ongoing cycle. This
curious process is the decisive departure from most other animal
minds that our evolving brains have made - in discovering that
it is expedient to generate the illusion of a self and self consciousness.

AUTHENTICITY

Being swept up in the immediate grip of an emotion of anger, affection,
moral judgement - feeling that `just is' or `just doing it' intensity -may
mirror similar present centered experiences in the anthropoid apes with
whom we share a common ancestor. This kind of immediate experience gives
the feeling of authenticity, much more than any amount of reflective `thinking
about it' can. Our more recently evolved narrative devices make our story,
but they are arid without the reinforcement of the more primitive limbic
circuits that link them to emotions and neuroendocrine arousal. The newer
and older structures are not simple upstairs/downstairs layered structures,
cognitive brain on top of emotional brain. Rather they are loops upon loops
in which our deepest limbic and brain stem circuitry has been wired to
and talks with newer cortical structures in a way that is absent in monkey
and apes. What we try to spin is a story of the delicate dance between
our fragile neuroendocrine configurations - the temperament and mood molecules
that can flood our brains - and the cognitive structures, self stories,
that brought them to life and which they now support.

ANIMALS

We can feel solace and companionship from our pets because of their
external behaviors that seem so similar to our own (affection, fear,
anger, sadness),
and we feel that they must be having internal experiences similar to
ours. Perhaps, when a purring cat has starting to make kneading motions
on you
with its paws (as it did to pump milk from its mother's teats when it
was a kitten) you have felt a moment of calm or repose. Have you felt
a brief
moment of uplift or playfulness when an excited puppy has bounced up
and down in front of you? Draw away, however, and think of shaking off
for
a moment the assumption that a pet's feelings are like yours, of looking
in their eyes to ask not "Hello, who's in there?" but rather "What's
in there." Can you sense more of an alien strangeness?

Imagine living only on the cusp of the present, looking only into the next
moment rather than ever reflecting back, having the subjective feeling
of being the vehicle doing the journey rather than a passenger in it, being
a moral patient rather than an agent as impulses to desire or avoid arise
seemingly from nowhere. Such a state of present centered `just being' might
be the closest we can approach to having the experience of an animal such
as our pet. For us, approaching such a space does not come naturally. We
are able to let our minds move towards resting in the present only by employing
a cognitive technology such as meditation to be aware of and then set aside
the traffic noise of our usual internal discourse. Does suspension of this
chatter then let us sense that even our feeling of `being there' - as reflective
observer and actor - might be a recent evolutionary overlay grafted onto
our more basal animal consciousness?

THREAT

It is hardly a surprise that our evolved brains have more structures obviously
devoted to threat and alarm than to pleasure and contentment, that the
former are easily triggered while for most of us the latter require slower
cultivation. These ancient parts of our mammalian brains, such as the almond
shaped amygdala, are central to the ease with which we so readily `scare
ourselves' when minor social setbacks are magnified to bring forth the
emotional and visceral correlates of a tiger at the door. When we experience
an apparently inexplicable interruption of a period of benign calm by an
anxious impulse, we might wonder whether our threat-making circuits haven't
determined, on a rhythm of their own, that an episode of vigilance is due.

MEANING

Does recognizing that even the most rich of our emotional and affiliative
experiences rise from processes as impersonal as the birth and death of
stars doom us to an aridity of soullessness and no-meaning, is it required
to lead to nihilism and disillusionment? Perhaps not, if we suggest that
the issue has been miscast, that from a biologist's perspective these imagined
dire consequences might be viewed as an imposition of our social brains
on a biology that simply evolved to `be.' Being perpetually curious and
seeking meaning turned out to be much too good a survival trick for humans,
those curious brains weren't designed to face no-meaning and other questions
of philosophers. They were designed to be a `we' in a symbiotic confluence
with the social body, to make stories about origins and ends that traditional
religions encompass. Such stories are confabulations that let us feel more
comfortable about the reality that our conscious selves are a very small
fraction of a larger whole they can never fully understand or control.

UNION

In normal development each of us moves from a primal union with caretakers
through an individuation that is most pronounced in advanced individualistic
western societies. The pain of the separation into a isolated self can
be ameliorated by feeling re-owned by a community that substitutes for
the sense of security felt by the infant in its caretakers. Richness of
union can be felt because the same neuroendocrine affiliative hormonal
mechanisms stimulated by infant-caretaker interactions are elicited. Insight
into the biological origins of social bonding provides in principle a rationalization
of even our loftiest experiences of union. Understanding these origins
need not compromise the richness of the experience. Just as an infant savors
the richness of being held and protected, so can the devoutly scientific
or religious person savor what remains of that energy in their adult communities
as they live with a simple animal curiosity and gentle respect for the
mystery of it all.

Morality

While taking refuge or finding personal meaning in a conventional religion
offers the prospect of some repose and a set of instructions for moral
and right action, the issue always rises of how that system explains or
justifies the evil in the world, especially the violence done by humans
to each other and their environment. Evolutionary explanations of why humans
have developed aggressive, xenophobic, and genocidal tendencies offer a
'why' for these behaviors, but don't offer an obvious set of instructions
for moral and right action. We humans generate an array of aggressive,
affiliative, curious behaviors seen also in higher mammals, but we posses
also the remarkable ability to have some insight into, and choice about,
their operations. Thus we are able to become moral agents, rather than
moral patients, and chose those behaviors that are most life affirming
- to become our own gods. Such a course, a training of the introspective
intelligence required for insight and choice, is a much more arduous option
than adopting the simple precepts of an established culture or religion.
But, it is more likely to create humans who can extend their compassion
and caring beyond the tribal and cultural boundaries that are the origins
of intolerance.